Archive for the duke

It’s been a while since I’ve compiled reviews, if I ever did, so here are links to some of the longer, more detailed reviews of my novels:
Read, React, Review reviewed The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom and Their Lover twice: number one and number two (for politics).

This post was inspired by an essay on swearing in romance novels over at Alpha Heroes.
I thought a lot about the way my characters in The Duke & the Pirate Queen would swear. The book is set in a fantasy world that is not dominated by Christianity; more than that, I’d gone out of my way to avoid mentioning religion at all. Also, I wanted the swearing to be part of the worldbuilding.

All the cursing/swearing I can think of is religious, sexual, or scatological. I’d thought about worldbuilding swearing before I started writing this book, because my fellow workshopper Judith Berman came up against the issue when writing her science fiction story Pelago. (Read it online. It’s awesome.) She, too, wanted to avoid religious cursing. She didn’t want sexual cursing, either. Instead, she went far, far into scatological cursing, from basics like “shitsmear” all the way to “you steamy squish-squish shit-puddle.”

There was no way I could top that! Inspired by Judith, I did use “Bloody dripping weaselshit!” (character who lives on land) and “Bloody flux in a hurricane” (character who is a sailor).

I tried out “Do I really smell like a rotted jellyfish?” to reference the ocean, since most of the book takes place at sea. And for a religious touch that worked with the ocean theme, I decided marine animals would be fitting to take the place of gods: By the Great Whales of the Deep, she knew what he was.

For the most part, though, given that my book was erotica, I decided some sexual swearing would be required. I just wanted to make it feel different from our world’s sexual swearing, so it would be seamless with the fantasy. This world has many fewer sexual hangups than ours. So a simple f*** him became, “Julien can go and suck a splintery arse-dildo.”.

This post was originally written for The Smutketeers; I’ve expanded it here.
Why did I want to write about pirates? Well, because they’re sexy. It’s the outfits, you know. All that silk and tattered finery! The amazing tattoos. The cutlasses. The way they grab hostages and lock them in cabins for their own pleasure. And finally, the isolation. Being stuck on a ship together is like the traditional “trapped in a lonely cabin” story, only with the possibility of being eaten by sharks. It’s just plain fun. I had a blast reading the back cover blurbs on a pile of pirate romance novels, and making lists of all the tropes.

I was never the biggest fan of pirates before. I enjoyed reading the classic Captain Blood in high school and, more recently, saw the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I’ve read some pirate and sea adventure romances, and am looking forward to reading, in particular, Captured by Beverly Jenkins. I researched Asian pirates, particularly Japanese pirates in conflict with China and Korea, which was really fascinating. But my true loves so far as ocean novels goes are the Napoleonic sea adventure novels by C.S. Forester (the Hornblower series) and Patrick O’Brian (the Aubrey-Maturin series). (Yes, I’ve seen all of the film and television adaptations, but I love the books best.)

Since my novel was set in a fantasy world, I decided to combine these two sub-genres, pirate romances and sea adventures, for The Duke and the Pirate Queen. I took elements from my reading on Asian pirates and combined them with Napoleonic-era European ships and the tropes of sea adventure novels. The heroine, Imena Leung, is the daughter of an Imperial admiral who married one of her barbarian captives. Imena fought pirates, so really she’s a privateer, but the world doesn’t see her that way, and now pirates are after her again, when she thought she’d put it all behind her. And now she isn’t just protecting herself, but her lover.

For my pirates, I had fun both with making them eeeevil and also making them a bit more complex than one’s standard mental image of a pirate who is all outfit and greed. I ended up with two major pirate characters. One of them I made into a flamboyantly angry and greedy villain. The other was more ambiguous; at times she appears cruel and violent, but there are also good reasons for some of the things she does.

I used the pirates’ attack as a way of propelling several aspects of the plot. First, their attack created an opportunity for a big action scene! But eventually, their attack also led to emotional revelations for the hero and heroine.

This post was originally written for Shelley Munro’s blog.
Though I read a lot, I was never good at articulating what made a satisfying ending for a novel. Over years of writing, I got better at endings, mostly thanks to fellow-workshoppers Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Holly Black and the trenchant comments they made on my first novel.

The main thing I learned from them was that if certain things don’t happen at the end of a novel, the reader won’t be happy (both have a gift for identifying what those things are). It’s not that those expected things are the same from book to book. It’s that you, the author, arouse expectations, and the reader wants those expectations satisfied; in fact, they want to be better than satisfied. They want you to come up with a solution that is better than they imagined.

Remember, you can always go backwards and insert expectations as you revise!

I liken this method of creating endings to Lois McMaster Bujold’s method of plotting, which seems to involve putting her lead character into the worst situation possible for them, continuing to make it worse, yet somehow pulling out success for them at the end, even if the success is tinged with failures…and somehow making those failures even more intriguing than total success would have been.

I don’t think I’m even close to Bujold’s level of plotting yet, but I did experiment a bit with The Duke and the Pirate Queen by moving back and forth between two plotlines, one primary and one secondary. To do that, I made sure that neither plotline dropped out of sight for too long, and I would mention each one briefly within the other so the reader could keep them both in mind. I used questions and cliffhangers to move from one plotline to the other. And both plotlines had to come together at the end. Events of the secondary plotline made the primary plotline possible, so they came together with (I hope) great satisfaction for the reader.

When writing the synopsis for the novel I knew I had to visit an island, and if possible my protagonists needed to be taken captive by islanders. Since this was an erotic novel, the islanders would force them to compete in a sort of sexual display contest. It wasn’t until I’d had a little break from the manuscript, though, that I realized I’d completely missed an opportunity.

Luckily, around then I received the manuscript back with a request for some minor revisions. I checked in with my editor, told her my idea, and received permission to revamp the island scene by making it an homage to The Odyssey.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Odyssey IX, from a translation I found online:

“…on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. … the Lotus-Eaters gave [the crew] to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.”
Some historians suggest the plant meant was Ziziphus lotus, which is related to the jujube, though I suspect there’s also an element of fantasy in the description.

The idea of islanders who subsist mainly on drugging flora fit in well with an erotic novel. I could thus easily force the protagonists into the otherwise unlikely situation of a sex competition, which led to new revelations about their characters. The drugged islanders added not only an element of humor but also of dystopic fear, resulting in a chapter that was much more gripping than before the revision.

This post was originally written for Inez Kelley’s blog.
I have never been a particular fan of pirates. They’re really just thieves on boats, right? (*ducks missiles*)

Perhaps that’s why the heroine of The Duke and the Pirate Queen was actually a privateer, sanctioned by her government to hunt pirates. She’s on the side of Law. Mostly. She fought and fights against enemies who have fewer scruples than she does, and that makes them more dangerous.

However, even though I’m not fond of pirate moral codes, I do adore their outfits. And action scenes! Flinging themselves from one ship to another, brandishing cutlasses, ululating bloodcurdling battle shrieks, all while very snappily dressed in silks and velvets and too much jewelry.

Okay, so maybe I do like pirates….

What I like are when pirates are the villains. True, I’ve enjoyed quite a few romance novels with pirate heroes, but those heroes always ended up vindicated in the end. For me, pirates are like vampires. I prefer them as villains. They’re really snazzy villains.

This post was originally written for Risky Regencies.The Duke and the Pirate Queen isn’t a historical. However, it is set in a fantasy world, and I’ve often noted that my approach to creating a fantasy world is very similar to the way I research to write a historical novel. The difference is in the variety of sources I feed into my brain. My subconscious, which I call my “backbrain,” assimilates all the information and, hopefully, leaves me with an idea of a world that holds together like a “real” world. My theory is that my own “voice,” as it were, imposes a kind of internal consistency on the ideas I choose to include.

I use history as a guide. Most of the countries in The Duke and the Pirate Queen are loosely based on one culture or another, sometimes with elements from different time periods depending on the thematic needs of the scenes I’ve set there. The Duke Maxime’s duchy, for example, is essentially a Mediterranean setting. Captain Imena Leung comes from an empire similar to fifteenth century China that is plagued by ninth century-style Japanese pirates.

Another important research source for The Duke and The Pirate Queen was its predecessor, The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom & Their Lover. I carefully went through my manuscript file and copied out all descriptions of the characters I planned to use again as well as all the descriptions of Maxime’s palace. I kept those bits of text on hand while writing new scenes set in Maxime’s duchy, to ensure internal consistency between the two novels.

For the main ship featured in the novel, Seaflower, I relied on a wide range of research material, most of it relating to ships used in the Napoleonic Wars, some to modern sailing ships. This was partly because I already had an interest in that period, and there are plenty of resources; but also as an homage to the sea adventure novels of Patrick O’Brian and C.S. Forrester, which influenced several events that take place in the story. I returned to O’Brian’s novels themselves to put a little more life into my understanding of sailing ships.

Finally, most of the plot turns on long-distance trade. When I first conceived the novel, I had not yet figured this out. The idea came later, from my pleasure reading; or rather, reading I knew might be useful to the story, except I pretended it wouldn’t, so I could pretend it was for pleasure!

Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices by Andrew Dalby and Sweets: A History of Candy by Tim Richardson added immeasurably to the “feel” of a world newly discovering trans-oceanic trade: “Whole pears, glittering with an armor of sugar crystals, spilled from a brightly polished silver bowl, and a mixture of saffron pastilles and candied violets adorned a perfect marzipan replica of the king’s castle.”

Those two books also provided me with an important character motivation, which I won’t reveal here. If I hadn’t been reading “outside” books, the novel would have been much poorer for it.

The final research source I used might not really count as research. I think of it as mining my own brain. All the research I’ve done before is in my brain, somewhere. When writing a fantasy novel, bits and pieces I may not even consciously remember rise to the surface and fill in gaps with my own voice.

This post was originally written for Ella Drake’s blog.The Duke and the Pirate Queen is set in a fantasy world that’s based on all kinds of elements taken from our own world. Maxime’s duchy is a Mediterranean-esque land with aspects of several centuries and countries.

Imena comes from an empire that’s very loosely based on fifteenth-century China–I say “loosely” because though I read Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America, no specific facts from it made their way into the novel. Instead, the idea of a powerful Asian naval power mingled with all sorts of pirate and sea adventure novels in the back of my brain, and later with some reading I did on Asian pirates. I used my research to give a feeling that events and places existed that weren’t shown in the story.

That’s what I mean by “the world beyond the story.” Even though I didn’t show the Horizon Empire or any imperial privateers other than Imena, knowledge of both was in my thoughts as I wrote the story, influencing how I portrayed Imena’s character and how she interacted with characters from the Duchies. The idea that she came from a large empire troubled by pirates, and that she fought those pirates, and that she gave it up, thoroughly underlies many aspects of her character.

Throughout the first chapters, I dropped small bits of information to build the reader’s knowledge of her privateering past. First descriptive facts: “…the intricate blue, red, and white designs tattooed on her scalp, each hard won in her youth as an Imperial privateer.” Then their place in the world: “Privateers were considered far below sailors in the navy” and “You can’t inherit a position in the imperial navy…You are, however, permitted to work as a privateer, risking death for the Imperium’s glory.” Then a bit more about what they do for the Imperium: “…the fringe-territory pirates whom they usually hunted.”

I think it’s just as important not to show certain aspects of your worldbuilding as it is to thoroughly describe. I most enjoy books where I can not only immerse myself in the world of the story, but I can feel that if I reach a bit farther, dig a bit deeper, there will be more of the story’s world for me to ponder.

It’s the end–I think–of my blog “tour” in celebration of this month’s launch of The Duke and The Pirate Queen. The last stop is Shelley Munro’s Blog where I’m talking about, appropriately, “Satisfying Endings.”

Stop by and let me know what you think!

(The shark pirate figurine is one of three “mutant pirates” that live atop my dresser. He tries to look mean, but he’s really quite sweet! Look at his little shark-shaped sword! And I love his snazzy buccaneer boots.)

…And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, “We will return no more”;
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”